As the amount of information available to be retrieved by queries to computers increases, and as the type and number of information consumers seeking to retrieve such information increases, it has become increasingly important to understand the informational goals of the information consumer who generates a query to retrieve such information. Understanding consumer informational goals can improve the accuracy, efficiency and usefulness of a question-answering service (e.g., search service) responding to such queries, which leads to improved information gathering experiences.
Conventional question-answering (QA) systems may employ traditional information retrieval (IR) methods and/or may employ some form of natural language processing (NLP) to parse queries. Such systems may return potentially large lists of documents that contain information that may be appropriate responses to a query. Thus, an information consumer may have to inspect several relevant and/or irrelevant documents to ascertain whether the answer sought has been provided. Such inspection can increase the amount of time spent looking for an answer and reduce the amount of time spent employing the answer. Thus, the efficiency and value of seeking answers through automated question answering systems has been limited.
Data associated with informational goals that may be found in a query may be ignored by conventional systems. Such conventionally ignored data can provide clues concerning what the information consumer seeks (e.g., the type of data an information consumer is seeking, the precision of an answer sought by a query, and other related information in which the information consumer may be interested). Conventional statistical analysis, when applied to information consumer queries, may yield information that can be employed to improve the relevance of documents returned to an information consumer. But the traditional statistical information retrieval approach, even when employing such shallow statistical methods can still be associated with a poor experience for the information consumer employing a question answering system.
Addressing in an automated manner queries posed as questions can be more difficult than addressing traditional keyword-based queries made to search engines. Users presenting well-formed questions (e.g., “What is the capital of Poland?”, “Who killed Abraham Lincoln?”, “Why does it rain?”) typically have a particularly specific information need and corresponding expectations for receiving a well-focused answer. But people presenting keyword-based queries to the Internet may expect and tolerate a list of documents containing one or more keywords that appear in the free-text query.